Say what you will about Jason Aaron and Esad Ribic’s Thor: God of Thunder – and you can say what you want, just know that anything other than “This is perhaps the best comic that Marvel has produced in the last decade” will probably get you looked at funny in most quarters – but the features that made it such an interesting comic-book epic also rendered it ill-suited for adaptation in this current phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Aaron dealt with headier questions than many of his contemporaries in the thematics – what would happen if a vengeful and scorned atheist were confronted with the existence of indifferent and selfish Gods and was then given the means to slay them, and what would happen if a well-meaning God found himself the only remaining force in the universe capable of saving his people, who, perhaps should not be saved after all? – and Ribic’s gorgeous Vermeer-colored artwork gave the storytelling a painterly majesty normally reserved for material much grander like, say, the destruction of Pompeii. Yet above all else, it was metal, which is to say that it was both hyper-serious and knowingly ridiculous, as well as somewhat blasphemous, at least to comic nerds (for an even bigger head-trip and something genuinely worthy of the Vatican’s scorn, check out Aaron’s The Goddamned, which is a brutal revisionist retelling of the book of Genesis from Cain’s perspective). Whatever Taika Waititi is – a swell comedian, a decent filmmaker, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter – he’s not goated with the metal sauce. The moniker “should be painted on the side of a van” is typically thrown out at movies that one would consider worthy of one’s horn-throwing, but that has always felt more Prog to me, which is exactly the lane that Waititi operates in: Self-aware goofballery, striving for the fun of hair metal without necessarily grokking the difference between fun excess (hair metal) and excess that can, like a roux, curdle if one’s not extremely careful or skilled (prog). Thor: Love and Thunder is the latter.

The bare bones of Aaron and Ribic’s story are preserved: A vengeful mortal named Gorr (Christian Bale) has acquired a mythical weapon known as the Necrosword, which can slay Gods, and only Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and buds can stop him before he finds a way to rid the universe of deities altogether. Yet a number of things have been changed: Gorr is now a true believer in a gold-suited God who let his followers (including Gorr’s daughter) die in the desert while he enjoyed the bounty of an oasis, which simplifies some of the complexity of his character; and instead of attempting to create a “Godbomb,” which only can be stopped by three Thors from throughout history (Young, Current and King), he’s seeking to wish the Gods out of existence. “But the Infinity Gauntlet’s gone,” you say, and trust me, Kevin Feige has found another way Marvel entity to take its place (talk about determination to preserve a “sacred plotline”) for this one film. Likewise, Thor’s motivations are also different: instead of being the self-assured badass forced to solve the mystery of who’s mauling these heavenly bodies, well, he’s a braggart who’s no longer the “Bro” that he was in Endgame, having spent time working on his bod and mind with the Guardians of the Galaxy in the interim. He’s still palling around the rock-man Korg (Waititi, who narrates portions of the film), and immediately turns to Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), the king of New Asgard, which has become a tourist trap under her guidance, in order to stop the God-Butcher.

But, of course, instead of those three Gods of Thunder Aaron used, each marking a point of maturity in the character’s life, Waititi and Feige have paired this Thor and round out the team with the “Mighty” Thor. Beneath the CGI steel mask (they’ve gotta stop doing this!) is Thor’s former flame, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who, stricken with Stage IV cancer, sought out the pieces of Mjolnir in order to see if they could help her heal. Instead, it gave her the Thunder God’s powers, as a sort of celestial Make-a-Wish, which is an angle that Waititi hints at but never quite heads down because doing so might be moving – a terminally ill person being able to experience flight, for God’s sake – and would take time away from the banter. Credit’s due: At least they didn’t make a meaningful attempt to conceal Mighty Thor’s identity, which was one of the most irritating things about that arc (editorial dictate seeming to get in the way of good storytelling, which is a tale as old as time in comic books), and gave it a proper ending, though they did jettison the whole reason that the storyline was in any way coherent on a character level. The whole point of that storyline was to consider what “worthiness” meant, given that Thor was no longer able to wield his magic hammer, and instead the God-like powers of the deity fell upon Jane, who accepted the role as her last chance to make a difference in the world. Here, she’s concerned with what exactly her catchphrase will be. Once Gorr kidnaps Asgardian children as a means of luring Thor and his magic axe to a confrontation in a shadow realm, the foursome decides that they need help, and so they seek the aid of Zeus (Russell Crowe) and other Gods in order to stop him.

One can feel the fatigue seeping through the screen, though, to be fair, it’s not on the part of any of the performers (save Portman, who may have taken the project in a last-ditch attempt to escape/cash the final check following the completion of whatever Byzantine contract she signed with Marvel back when it seemed as if these movies wouldn’t continue onward and onward until the very end of time itself, marked when our energy-based and hyper-intelligent descendants finally cancel their Disney+ subscriptions en masse). Hemsworth remains amusing as Thor, being the only actor in the stable who has been wholly uplifted by Watiti’s more absurd yet still Whedon-esque dialogue, though he’s failed by the characterization, which sees the character essentially stuck in the same place he was at the start of Ragnarok. Bale is, in his limited screen time, occasionally creepy – there’s a fun scene in which he torments the Asgardian children with tales of gods he’s killed, punctuated by a moment where he pops the head off of a worm-like creature he’s using as a hand-puppet – and Crowe is having fun, adding swarthy Grecian sexuality to the kind of burly-man performance that Brian Blessed did in Flash Gordon back in the ’80s. Yet Waititi can’t help himself: he knows what works, and it’s his central foursome, each of whom mirrors each other in traits (for starters, Korg, Thor, and Jane serve the same function within the film’s humor, being awkward fish-out-of-water types who can’t speak no good) and despite an end-of-film montage of shit happening meant to create the illusion of arcs, everyone winds up in pretty much exactly the same spot they were at the conclusion of the last film. Thor must learn how to be responsible for someone other than himself, of course, and one can picture Feige shaking his fist at the character, saying “How many times do I have to teach you this lesson, young man?”

Worse, Waititi leaves a variety of interesting plot pivots on the table or underwrites them to the point of incomprehensibility. Gorr and Jane are mirror images of one another, but because of the fact that two subsequent comic arcs are being squished together, she’s only a co-protagonist at best, as the emphasis is still on Hemsworth. And like his hero, Waititi ducks responsibility in favor of exceptionally empty humor, attempting to plug every gap between ugly action sequences with excessively irritating humor and little payoff. Ragnarok was a really good film, but I think he learned the wrong lessons from its success: The jokes enhanced a compelling plot, which rewarded the viewer’s attention and gave you a reason to care about the characters. There’s nothing as satisfying as the reappearance of Surtur – the “I know I can’t, but he can” that has become meme fodder in the subsequent years – or as moving as the fall of Asgard, which is as swell of a bummer ending as any of these movies have ever come towards. You can tell that he’s trying, with the sad Roeg-like introduction of Gorr’s plight (a fusion of tragedies from The Man Who Fell to Earth and Walkabout) or the Interstellar-evoking setting of the finale, but the banter never stops, and the entire escapade feels, at best, flippant.

This wouldn’t matter as much if Love and Thunder were fun to watch unfold, with some of the well-constructed and stylish imagery that Waititi at least brought to the table with Ragnorok or his other films, but it’s a visual mess. I hope Ribic never sees how his artwork was brought to the screen, with lifeless CGI crammed into every nook and Waititi’s rainbow vomit color scheme, which is never as vivid as it should be. An extended sequence where its absence is highlighted is the most compelling visual setpiece in the film precisely because it’s rendered with some amount of flair and is separate from its over-saturated surroundings. The fights are incomprehensible, with lightning zapping around the screen in lieu of recognizable choreography in often excessively-darkened surroundings, which has a side effect of drawing the viewer’s attention from what they should be following towards random directions on-screen. But even the minor details – the costumes, the settings, the weapons – each of which might have been given some manner of practical care had this film come from another studio, are stuffed to the gills with effects work, probably so Disney can get around those pesky “guilds” that were threatening to hold up production stateside before they moved the shoot to Australia. It is garish in a way that few other MCU projects have been, and if the bar for bad effects work in these movies was set at “Mark Ruffalo in the Hulkbuster Suit” in Infinity War, well, there are at least five sequences in this that will be in competition for those newly-opened spots above the previous record holder. It’s anything but a good time.

On the other hand, I think “flippancy” is a good way to describe Phase Four up through now: there’s only one film in the assortment so far that’s worth revisiting, and even that is marred by a lot of the same flaws as you’d find in Love and Thunder. Perhaps the relentless pace with which Feige and company have released their projects over the last few years and which has only increased thanks to the presence of the Disney+ shows, and the lack of an obvious endgame (I am very sorry) for the Marvel brain trust to orient their episodic-cinematic projects around have had a deleterious effect on the quality of the overall mission, even if the primary goal, cash money, remains successful. The deficit of care in this phase, however, remains troubling, at least in comparison to the previous films in the MCU. There were always dogshit filler movies meant to act as stop-gaps between important and/or risky films, but they didn’t define the whole of a given era like they have now.

It’s important to remember the circumstances of Marvel Studios’ emergence: They were a disruptive force, a meeting place between studio adaptations of “nerd” intellectual property that either was too grim and dumb to complement the material’s origins or just harebrained comedy with little understanding of the appeal of fantastical tales like these. They took these stories seriously, but not self-seriously, and invited both long-time readers and alienated would-be fans scared of continuity and the trappings of stereotypical fandom to join them on the journey. They have become victims of their own success, with each subsequent release flipping between those two poles, with little of the balance that made them watchable adaptations. It’s fun to imagine each of these films as glimmering tears strolling down Feige’s stoic face, as he’s discovering that there are, in fact, no more multiplexes left to conquer. Perhaps he won’t metaphorically meet the same fate as Alexander did literally, and perhaps, even if he does, his kingdom will endure succession. But, as most emperors learn, it is harder to govern than it is to conquer.

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